


The Shipmaster's Song

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Afterlife, Boats and Ships, Canon Compliant, Love, M/M, Melancholy, Post-Canon, Supernatural Elements, are we ships francis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26034163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: In his second life, James awakens at the bottom of the ocean floor, inhabiting Erebus.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 9
Kudos: 57
Collections: @terror_exe Flash Fest





	The Shipmaster's Song

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this terror.exe prompt: [are we ships, francis?](https://twitter.com/terror_exe/status/1288537849189605382)

At the bottom of the ocean, he calls out. 

It is dark down here. The water is dark and dense and deep. Here, cupped in the current and borne up by a sandbar, sound travels faster than it ever might in open air. He rattles his timbers and his boards, piecing together sentences with the sound of his hull settling. With the sound of a ceramic jar falling. With the sound of a fin beating against the windows of his cabin. Empty now but for the seaweed and the eels. Empty save for the fish and for the whales. 

How long has he been talking? One-hundred and seventy years, give or take. The first twenty had been mostly silent. _Marco,_ he’d call, and no one would respond. Then, at long last, across the water:

_Polo._

_Are you there, James_ came the familiar voice in the dark, spoken with the sound of English oak and lined with steel beams. Even in another body, with an orlop for lungs and a gunroom for a stomach, James would know Francis. In the dark and in the light, in the deep and in the sky. 

_Yes._ He had tried to listen to the echo. How far away are you? How far away does _Terror_ lie? Where is your broken body? Are you close? In the dark, he can see little. It’s the squid that bear the news at last; another wreck lies forty-five miles away, in a bay to the south. James can hear the distance now. To a shipwreck thirty-two meters long, forty-five miles isn’t so very far at all. 

_Don’t go far,_ James had said. It had taken three weeks to say it, written out across a song of shattered plates and tinkling china. To a shipwreck in the shifting sands, time means little. 

Three weeks later. _I won’t. I won’t leave you._

 _No,_ he thinks. _You never have._ James has known many voices. In other places, other rooms. Francis has snarled and snapped at him, baring his teeth. Francis has gripped his shoulders, offering brotherhood in a gentle brogue. He had loved him then and at once. 

Francis has always been constant. The dark shadow of _Terror_ at James’ back, sailing across the Atlantic to this end, had always simply meant Francis. He remembers the feel of Francis’ hand on his neck, the acrid taste of the poison spilling down his throat. Then, there had been darkness. He had expected this, darkness and silence. Strange, to awaken here, in the deep, looking out through _Erebus’_ windowpanes, reaching to the surface with his masts. Sometimes divers come, swimming carefully through his halls with cameras and lights. He wonders what they will find. They pick the plates from the floor, bringing pieces of him to the surface. 

_Have they found you yet?_

_Not yet,_ Francis had said. Two years later, the divers came shining their lights, looking through the cracks in the wood. Through the windows of his sealed cabin. His sturdy desk, covered in silt and sediment. 

When you find the pieces, bring them up. When you find the bodies, bring them up. Keep them together. 

Forty-five miles. At the end, in the dark, all he has are words, so James tells stories. _Tell me about somewhere with sunshine,_ Francis asks, his voice creaking. It’s strange to hear him speak with _Terror_ ’s tongue. James tells Francis of the wide open fields of Hertfordshire, how he had run wild in the meadows, picking heather. How he had lain in the grass, his skin browning in the warm light. Tales of adventures south and east, of steamers taken up the Euphrates and cheetahs smuggled aboard. When the past dries up, James turns to invention. To the future. _We’ll be in the sun again. Someday, all this will fall to pieces. In the next life, we’ll be part of the same star._

_Don’t stop talking, James. Please._

_I won’t. If I can do anything, it’s talk._

_Don’t expect me to argue._

The words are scrawled in ice yet, still, James can hear the warmth. He never says _I love you_ in so many words, never puts the phrase into the seawater, but he knows Francis can hear it all the same. Sometimes, it doesn’t need to be said. There it is, love in the open water. 

When you find us, bring us up. When you find us, listen closely. The song is in the water, it will come on the back of the wind. 

Listen.


End file.
